PagerDuty sends notifications to on-call users when an incident is assigned to them. These notifications are most commonly sent when an incident triggers or escalates. Depending on the features in your account's pricing plan, users may also receive notifications when they are added as a responder or subscriber, or when a conference bridge is added to an incident.

Notification Content

Select from the articles below for more information about a specific notification channel:

• Push Notifications
• Email Notifications
• Phone Notifications
• SMS Notifications
• WhatsApp

Notification Behavior

PagerDuty bundles multiple notifications together to reduce noise. In certain circumstances, PagerDuty may send a generic message for incident notifications. You can also test and respond to notifications.

Notification Bundling

When a user is assigned to multiple incidents, PagerDuty bundles notifications into a single summary message to reduce alert fatigue and distractions. All notification methods (push, email, phone, and SMS) support notification bundling. Bundled notifications include information about all triggered incidents (that is, incidents that are not acknowledged or resolved).

The following examples assume a service named "Nagios-Shopping-Cart" has triggered five incidents within the previous minute.

Email

You are assigned 5 triggered incidents in PagerDuty:
Please visit the following URL to manage these incidents.
https://your-subdomain.pagerduty.com/incidents

1) Incident #100
   Opened on: Jan 1 at 12:00pm PST
   Service: Nagios-Shopping-Cart
   Description: Emergency in the server room
   Link: https://service-name.pagerduty.com/i/100

Phone

You have 5 triggered incidents on Nagios-Shopping-Cart. Press 4 to acknowledge all incidents. Press 6 to resolve all incidents. Press 0 for help or press * to repeat this message.

👍

Minimize Notifications

You can reduce the overall number of notifications you receive by adding a delay to your notification rules. Adding a few-minutes delay allows more time for incidents to aggregate, resulting in fewer notifications during periods of high incident volume.

SMS

ALRT: #100,#101,#102,#103,#104 on Nagios-Shopping-Cart. Reply 14:Ack all, 16:Resolv all

Generic Message Delivery

When PagerDuty encounters issues generating the full contents of an incident notification, it sends a generic message instead. This ensures on-call users are still alerted and can respond to incidents even if the expected details are not available in the notification. This generic message only applies to incident notifications and does not apply to other notification types.

The generic message states: You have a new incident update in PagerDuty. Open the mobile app or log in to view the full details.

Send Test Notifications

Refer to Test a Contact Method for more information.

Respond to Incident Notifications

Respond to incident notifications in the mobile app, through email, by phone, or SMS.

Respond from the Mobile App

Refer to Respond to Incidents in the Mobile App for more information about taking action on incidents in the mobile app.

Respond to an Email Notification

Responding to an email notification to acknowledge or resolve an incident is not supported. Use one of the following methods to take action on an incident instead:

• Web app (acknowledge, resolve)
• Mobile app
• Phone notification
• SMS notification

Respond to a Phone Notification

Similar to SMS notifications, you can respond to phone notifications to acknowledge, resolve, or escalate an incident.

An example phone notification states: PagerDuty Alert: You have one triggered incident on Signal Sciences. The failure is "Check outside normal range - Warning". Press 4 to acknowledge. Press 6 to resolve. Press 8 to escalate to the level 2 on call, User 2.

Enter the appropriate number on your phone's keypad to take one of the following actions:

• Acknowledge
• Resolve
• Escalate — available if there is another level in the service's escalation policy.

Respond to an SMS Notification

When you receive an SMS incident notification, you are prompted to Ack, Resolv, or Escal8 it. The specific code you receive for each action may vary, but Ack always ends in 4, Resolv always ends in 6, and Escal8 always ends in 8.

The following example shows an incident on a service named "Signal Sciences":